It is our fundraising season here at St. John's. Today you will receive your pledge cards. We’ll invite you to fill them out over the coming week, listing what you plan to give in the coming year, and then return the card next Sunday. These will enable the Bishop's Committee to put together the budget for the coming year.
I don't think there's ever been a time when a parish like ours is more needed--to speak the truths of gay people and many others to the larger church, to provide shelter and a place of rest to each other and to many people beyond our walls. I’ll say more about these things in a minute, but first a word about today’s gospel.
Jesus’ teachings weren't going over so well, especially among the religious leaders. He’d been talking about how the kingdom of heaven transforms human hearts and societies, but they weren't buying it.
Instead of lamenting this, Jesus praises God who is at work in this situation. “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants…”
The wise and the intelligent are the religious leaders. They know all about the 613 dictates of the law. They “tithe mint, dill, and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law”, like justice and love and compassion; “they strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” They like everything that can be seen: greetings in the marketplace, first places at table, long robes, the outside of the cup. What they do best is lay heavy burdens on people’s shoulders, judging and condemning them, all the while coming up with reasons to justify the fact that their own hearts have become flatlined.
They remind me of what the novelist Graham Greene once wrote about the church: “The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn't know what goes on in a single human heart.”
Those rules can be endless and petty; they crush the human spirit rather than nurture it. They cause people to lose zest and pleasure in life, to lose heart.
Not many people could follow all their petty rules and scripts. Many in those days may have wanted to fully participate in worship, for example, but they couldn’t follow all the purity rules needed to do it.
For example, shepherds were judged unclean most of the time, because they dealt with birth, disease, and death among their flocks and did not have the luxury of performing all the washing rituals. Anyone diseased, lame, blind, or disabled was also ritually impure. Lepers, tax collectors, and sinners were shunned for their impurity.
These are the “heavily burdened” Jesus is referring to in today’s gospel: the ones who, try as they might, can never succeed at conforming to all the religious laws and cultural scripts.
All of which brings me to the first reason why a parish like St. John’s can be so important.
As many of you know, my own heart is “heavily burdened” right now, as I know many of yours are, because of the objections that have been raised to my being officially installed as vicar and the charges recently filed against me in the church courts.
I still haven’t seen the charges or the evidence being used to support them, so I admit that my perspective is still somewhat limited. But I suspect this is part of a larger culture war.
A few people have peered into the culture of somewhat typical gay men like me, misread what they have seen there, and made moral judgements and condemnations that are simply unfair. In this case, the “typical gay man” would be me. But it could be any one of a million others--and not just gay men, but also many women and many straight people. This is not just about me.
Since the cultural upheavals of the sixties, many of our lives no longer fit the old scripts. As I see it, we do, in fact, share many of the values of our grandparents, but we live those values differently. Our relationships are hopefully as strong and faithful and loving as theirs--but ours don’t always look the same as theirs.
Unfortunately, this is not always understood by people looking into our culture from outside. Maybe it’s understandable that they misread us. This often happens when people of one culture peer into another. But the judgements and condemnations that arise from that misreading are often wrong and unfair. From what I know so far, I believe that is true in this case.
Let me think out loud for a moment. Rather than lamenting this current situation and feeling victimized by it, what if we try Jesus’ approach in today’s gospel: Give thanks to the Lord of heaven and earth who is at work in this moment.
Maybe there is grace here. For example, maybe this is a moment for “typical gay dudes” like me to say our word, talk a little more about our lives and love and the powerful values we live by. It’s a message the larger church might benefit from hearing. Just saying.
Maybe this is one reason that a community like St. John’s can be so important at this time in history. Our church and our larger culture have come a long way on gay issues, but the present situation may indicate that we still have work to do.
Could it be that, in this moment, our community in particular is being called to an important ministry of dialogue with our larger Diocese and church? This is a question. I’m just wondering about these things...
Back to the gospel for a moment. To those who are weary and heavily burdened, Jesus says, "Come to me, and I will give you rest."
But it's a certain kind of rest. He's not calling for shorter work weeks and better vacation benefits. He's offering the sabbath rest, the rest of the seventh day after God created heaven and earth, and he looked on all he had created and said “It is good”, and he rested.
Rest happens when our true nature is realized, when we live in harmony with ourselves, our neighbor, nature, and God.
This is the kind of rest many weary people like us have found in this crazy character we call Jesus, the one who knows each of us fully and loves us completely. That love transforms us, expands our hearts for even more love and life and joy--so that we can become, like Jesus, a place of rest for each other.
Our community has a history of doing precisely this.
In the early days of the AIDS crisis, when many gay men were being disowned by their families, kicked out of their churches, and fired from their jobs, many came here to St. John’s. They found in this community a home and a place of rest, where they could be themselves, die a little less alone, with a little more peace. They were heavily burdened and we became a place of rest for them. Many of them chose to be buried in our garden. You can see their names in the narthex. In those days, when so many of us were heavily burdened, we became for each other a place of rest.
That story continues today. In our story sharing earlier this year, we learned some of the things that are currently keeping many of us awake at night. Most often mentioned was aging, our own and that of those we care for. The second was violence in our neighborhoods and City.
To help us address these important issues, we recently joined the San Francisco Organizing Project (SFOP), a coalition of faith communities, many of whom share our concerns about these issues.
Working with SFOP, several of us will soon be giving input to the Human Rights Commission as they form their own recommendations on this topic. Shortly after that, I expect that people from our community will be sitting down with Members of the Board of Supervisors and staff from the Mayor's Office to tell them how it is for us as we grow older in this city, what we need to stay healthy, have a decent place to live, be secure.
Stay tuned for more information about those upcoming meetings and events. Our community can make a big difference here, not just for ourselves, but for many others.
We also said during our story sharing that we were heavily burdened by all the violence around us. This affects not just us, but many others, including far too many young people in this neighborhood who are swept up into the gangs when they're just 11 or 12 years old. Too many of them have been shot and killed, and too many sent to prison. I've talked to some of their moms, shed more than a few years with them.
In response to this violence, beginning Wednesday, October 16th, clergy and people of faith from the Mission will be regularly walking as a group along our streets that have seen the most violence. In a low-key way, we’ll be letting our neighbors, especially our young people, know that we want the violence to stop, that we want them to be both alive and free.
In other places where similar walks are underway--in Oakland and Richmond--the homicides along their routes have dropped by as much as 30%. We hope these walks will make a similar difference here, protecting our kids and keeping us all safer. Again, this is another thing that has emerged from our story sharing a few months back.
These are a few of the things we do to provide shelter and a place of rest to each other. There are ways we also make a difference, provide a shelter, a place of rest, for many beyond our walls.
We continue working for immigration reform, trying to bring rest to immigrant families now living in fear of being torn apart by unjust immigration laws. Through Mission Graduates, we help kids stay in school--kids who might otherwise get discouraged and drop out. Through El Porvenir we help villages in Nicaragua get clean water for their families. Through the Julian Pantry we help people in our neighborhood and City get food.
Should I add that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence took a shine to us when they held one of their successful bingos here?
The story keeps unfolding...
Several weeks ago, I was invited to meet with a group of Latina transgendered women in our neighborhood. Many of them had fled their own countries seeking a place of rest and shelter here in the US. I went to their gathering place on 16th Street, and while I was waiting for the meeting to start, I was looking at a large wall with a huge gallery of photos of transgendered women. In the middle of all these photos was a large picture of our Lady of Guadalupe surrounded by votive candles and small Christmas tree lights. I assumed the photos were of famous transgendered women, or perhaps former officers of their organization.
Then I learned that these were photos of women who had been killed right here in our neighborhood in the last several years. This was a wall of remembrance. Many of these women's deaths went unreported and were not investigated because everyone was afraid to go to the police station to fill out the reports--afraid of being harassed by the officers themselves, or of being deported if they happened to be undocumented.
A couple of weeks after that meeting, about sixty of these women gathered here at St. John's to share their stories and to discuss ways to make things better. They loved being here. They felt safe here.
Now discussions are underway with them and with the Human Rights Commission to have our church become officially designated as a safe space, not only for them, but for other vulnerable and heavily burdened groups in our neighborhood. With personnel and resources provided by the City, people like these women will be able to come here, rather than the police station, to fill out police reports, to learn about their rights, and about the resources and services available to them. A newly emerging chance for us to be the hands and heart and feet of Jesus, giving rest to a group that is heavily burdened.
And all these things we try to do begin and end right here each Sunday at this table where we gather as a people, tell the story of Jesus in words and music and gestures, and break the bread.
At the center of it all is an overpowering love for this amazing person we call Jesus. It is as his followers that we do these things. It’s because of him that all these things make sense.
It’s at this table that we most fully remember the kind of community we have been and are and hope to become.
Today you will receive your pledge card, and we ask you to return it next Sunday so the Bishop’s Committee can start planning next year’s budget. Please prayerfully consider how much you can contribute financially to help us be this kind of community. Please be as generous as you can.
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